By Elena Tiis
October 21, 2009 Felix Meritis, Amsterdam
In the crowded top floor room of the Felix Meritis, the moderator asks what the composition of the crowd is. Raise your hands. They go up at music labels representatives, managers, producers, artists, IT people, some students of this or that. Possibly the single most unifying aspect of this melange is the frequent ownership of an iPhone… Music & Bits was a pre-emptive kick-off to the Amsterdam Dance Event unfolding from the 22nd to 25th of October 2009. It consisted of a Hack Track in the morning for the technically inclined, and of a conference in the afternoon. In the following, I will loosely sketch out the course of the conference.

The talks begin by an exchange between the Berlin-based SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss and the DJ Speedy J. They strike quite a relaxed pose; no powerpoints and no notes, just an exchange to which the audience was invited to participate quite heavily. First, Wahlforss is describing how he’s been involved with music and “web stuff” for 15 years to date. But these have largely been parallel tracks for him. Frustrated with the limiting landscape of Yousendit and MySpace on the web for the purposes of sending and being exposed to new music, and the rote of sending/downloading/emailing in order to participate in it, his musicianship was beginning to move into the direction collaborative software creation. Music had become links that you pass around on the web since 2005, and SoundCloud began two years later. Wahlforss notes that there’s a big value for instant exchange and the new opportunities that technology provides. At this point, a manager of some kind from the audience prompts him about the legality of the matter – “how is this allowed?” In response, Wahlforss acknowledges that there is a grey area of content on the web, and there are certainly mashups of pieces that haven’t been cleared legally, but these form only a fraction of what SoundCloud contains.

Speedy J notes that it’s rather surprising that the first audience question should gauge the legality of grey use only. Importantly, a lot of the musician’s craft is in abusing technologies, and pushing these to uses not set up for them. Stretching these to their limits does the difference, it makes music interesting. At the beginning of his career, about 10 to 15 years ago, he had to often wrap his head around non-musician systems which meant often trying to enter the head of the instrument producer in order to create music. To this respect, SoundCloud is distinguishable by its musician-friendliness: it’s exploiting its possibilities to the fullest.

As concerns the audience question about the limited publicising capacity of SoundCloud, Wahlforss notes that the platform is not really oriented towards it: for the moment it mostly caters for people who already have a network. “We are before viral spreading yet, there is no “viral button” you can push.” Its use is as a tool with which to solve specific problems. SoundCloud’s business model is rather like that of Flickr – one can buy a pro-account in various forms, from single use to labels for their back catalogues but what mostly constitutes it is free use. A live application might be coming out soon, but at the moment it is not too mobile, computer-based, perhaps soon one can use the iPhone as a field mike…

Muxtape’s Justin Ouellette is next with a history of his application. He traces the beginnings of Muxtape in about 2003 when he hosted a college radio and wanted to have log of the tracks he played online for other people. Further, even before that the concept of sharing and mixtapes was inspired by the late 90s culture of turntablism, DJs and remix culture. Muxtape launched in early 2008 as a site hosting mixes of other people’s music but was shut down in late 2008 by the RIAA. In 2009 it resurfaced again as a platform for bands. Ouellette expands upon this aspect. As well as, importantly, on his preoccupation on keeping it stylistically simple.

Five things about design that dealing with Muxtape has taught him:
1. Focused design is all around.
It is centered around experience and engages the everyday. To this purpose, he devotes some time to what seems like an ode to the Galanz microwave in his NY apartment. It fits the space and the controls are simple and present a good user interface. This fascination with simplicity translates into Muxtape’s outlook.
2. Clean does not equal simple.
3. Event or the context are important for the experience.
For instance, in most car stereos there are too many buttons. Using it to listen to music therefore becomes a kind of exercise in frustration; and when an application frustrates you already before you start listening, there’s something off with the design.
4. Don’t throw away old models.
Muxtape itself is modelled after the analogue cassette tape. There is charm to old forms.
5. Limitations can be deceiving.
Mixtapes are 90 minutes long, which makes it easy to understand its limits. One packs concentrated effort into creating a mix in stead of trying out a few off the cuff like with a digital playlist now. The maximisation of choice, like in huge supermarket, is not necessarily the best; the charm of mixtapes was always about how people collaborate to delimit choice.

In response to audience question of whether Muxtape was singled out as a poster boy for the copyrights crowd, Oubliette notes that there might be something in that because Muxtape always was so self-evidently about music and did not couple it with blogging or other types of uses which would have meshed with easy categories. For the moment, he is concentrating on developing the second generation Muxtape as a promotion site for bands. The first generation Muxtape cannot come back because it seems that the industry is not yet ready for it!

Next, Brian Whitman of the Echo Nest gives “a short personal history of computers listening to music, 1999-2009”. He begins with tracing out his own beginnings as a producer of IDM in the New York scene, and his eventual dissatisfaction with the dynamic of “guys sitting in front of laptops looking so serious”. Software making is something that has made him a better musician. He took a PhD at MIT in information retrieval, in an environment which was looking at music as a file and at audio like a text. Algorithms do not understand music, however, to which respect he is very much concerned about figuring out how to get music into music analysis. To illustrate, or rather to soundbite some of these concerns, he played some automatically generated holiday music based on a statistical reproduction of 1,000 Christmas songs. It’s a strange disjunction; I for one can’t hear the holidayness in the machine’s rendering of the 1,000 such songs. He argues that it is necessary to understand language and audio at the same time.

As for Echo Nest itself, it grew out of the understanding that the best music experience is still manual. Data is actually hard: collaborative filtering (recommends other things that people have clicked on) is a bad recommendation system – it “destroys music”. If only collaborative filtering is the only system of online recommendation, the popular acts will eat the minor ones. Music forums like “I Love Music” capture some of the excitement of people about music, and it forms a much better palette of recommendations.

What the EchoNest does is trying to know everything about music and its listeners by processing data, which they sell to social networks, labels, video games etc. It has produced a range of products such as Fanalytics (a toolset for artists), and maintains an open source remixing community and code base which has produced, among other things, Morecowbell.dj for adding cowbells to songs… In the end, Echo Nest aspires to be something like a Google Earth of music.

Andie Nordgren and Martin Roth of RjDj present the concept of reactive music, and the possibility of having a sound studio in one’s pocket. Music not necessarily linear, they claim: encoding music can be done so that it is different every time. They begin with something of a timeline: in 1998 the sound studio becomes software, in 2008 the sound studio is found in the personal music player. This changes the consumption, distribution and production of music.

To make this audible, they showcase recent project: Kids on DSP’s reactive minimal techno. While demoing it live, Nordgren is talking/blowing/clicking fingers into the iPhone microphone which feeds it back into the music in distorted form. Someone with an iPhone tweets their fascination about this to their Twitter account right in front of me.

The RjDj ecosystem is composed of the reactive music player, music scenes which can be uploaded to the iPhone and composer tools. There is an online recording and scene community where recordings can be uploaded and which contains a search catalog. RjDj is not composition software of itself, neither is it attempting to build this up. It is rather about tapping into a “sweet spot” for a listener, to modifying sound in reaction to the environment that a person is moving in. … explains that they were taking technological concepts from, for instance, sound installations for the creation of a mobile experience. RjDj needs artists construing a base scene that the iPhone user can download to be reactively played. So it is a way of making interesting the value of someone else’s recordings. In audience prompt about the nature of their web presence, Nordgren notes that the site does not contain networking aspects yet but it might be on the roadmap. It is an API for musicians, not developers and the app is just a transport medium.

Next Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle climbs up to talk about the online music ecosystem. He stresses that he does not want to give a historical presentation about what has been happening with the application during the 7 years since it was first inaugurated. Human years are like dog years in the Internet world, so Last.fm – as a big dog – is over 50 about now.

In 2002 what would become the Last.fm of today started as two projects: a personal online radio which learns over time and an audioscrobbler which is a desktop media player plugin that tracks what you listen to. In combining the two, the developers got a feedback loop for crowdsourced music recommendation. 2009 was tough in the ad-supported music space because Last.fm’s music licensing and revenue model was constrained to the US, UK and Germany at the same time as the radio service was truly world wide. Making radio listening by subscription only in non-ad supported countries, caused some controversy and a fair degree of hate mail but the application has been weathering this quite well subsequently.

Music is not a product and not a service, but it exists within a “shifting ecosystem of discovery and use”. Last.fm in this sense is guided music delivery, the “connective tissue for your online musical life”. Ogle notes that it is true that Last.fm must be self-critical at certain points: they must acknowledge their own ecosystem – community of users and influence – and communicate better with it. This last point was engaged better in the case of the inactivity bear sign – a bear pops out when the user has been listening for a long time without doing anything. This actually managed to engage a lot of playful response in the form of people submitting various different versions of the inactivity bear. Currently the team is working on combo radios, multiscrobbles and party radio intersections (although everyone’s average music is not necessarily the best of the people involved) as a way of making the online radio listening a more fluid concept. There is also a project for Xbox with Microsoft.

Hypem or The Hypemachine (Anthony Volodkin and Last.fm’s artistic director Hannah Donovan) talk of the inevitable effects of style on music websites. Hypem aggregates what music people talk, or blog, about. In their talk about style, they start with noting that visual designers often last looked at when it comes to developing new applications. Good art doesn’t match your sofa and there are certain principles than need courting in the creation of a good website: user experience design (user needs), limitations, interaction design (user feel), content and visual design (looks). All of these have to be considered together, they cannot be separately developed and fused together later and their grouping like this should not necessarily reflect the order of importance although they are executed like that quite often.

When it comes to a evaluating a site, start with the “ooh” metric. However, it is hard to impress with style alone when this is not paralleled by content. The applications that take or track your data must create an “atmosphere of trust” with people. To this extent, Volodkin and Donovan flick through examples of sites that overstyle and detract from the point of a music site – that is, the music – to sites that are afraid of styling at all. Also, certain examples tap into a very restricted audience - there is an indie feel to the redness of Last.fm to which extent they’ve added the option of “paint it black”. Donovan argues that MySpace can actually manage to be communicative, connecting the public of a band with the music with the help of customisable aesthetics, for instance the page of the band Beirut. One can style without stylizing, which the route that Last.fm has taken.

The look of a social networking site has to contain visual shorthand for: “this site has social stuff on it”. Design culture can grow pocket-like, geographically specifically on the web, for instance Muxtape and tumblr tap into a certain New York geek look to Japanese sites disliking white space, to the extent that they are striving for being as crowded as possible. In short, sites do not exist in a vacuum, and music is messy so there is no reason why it can’t be presented in messy ways online too. Also, a site has to be conscious of what it wants to be when it grows up: does it want a mainstream audience or is it merely wanting to capture a certain audience. All in all, style does not necessarily mean stylisation.

As a last minute surprise revelation, Henrik Berggren from Citysounds.fm offers the audience the invitation to test the iPhone application to be launched next day. Citysounds.fm adds cities and location – pictures from Flickr – to music – from SoundCloud – so that cities have musical landscapes. The popularity ratings come from Twitter.

By Elena Tiis

Sitting in the plush, red chairs at Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt in Utrecht on the 15th of October, I listened in to the lectures of the “Accelerated Living” conference dealing with the ecologies of time & speed, and media technologies’ capacity to impact contemporary time experience.

The kick off was with John Tomlinson’s (UK; Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham) lecture on the culture of speed. Taking a broadly historical approach to what speed is, Tomlinson describes it as a condition of immediacy, a most spectacular transaction between time and space, that Marx describes as the “annihilation of space with time” (Grundrisse). Speed in general is under-researched; it fades from view in considerations of modernity, except for Virilio to an extent. Marinetti in “The Futurist Manifesto” talks about omnipresent speed, about capturing in art countercultural appropriations of speed. Interestingly, Tomlinson characterises Le Corbusier as a mainstream version of speed appropriation because the Swiss talked how a “city made for speed is a city made for success”, imagining how the speedways of the Voisin plan would serve businessnessmen as they swished to and from work. This type of speed was the mechanical, physical speed that could putatively transform the whole world.
Contemporary “fast capitalism” is facilitated by ICTs. The integration of media is a key dynamic for understanding of how this type of fast speed works, how it leads to the general increase of intensity and mobility. High speed speculative activity has the capacity to induce crisis.

To characterise this condition of fast capitalism, Thomlinson introduces the concept of “immediacy”, which is instant/has no lapse and proximate/close. It is a quality of cultural experience, containing a new sense of compulsion in life – that of communicational imperative or demand. To this effect, he treats a Blackberry ad as Derrida’s pharmacon – both a poison and a cure – because it is useful for both work and leisure. It also signals the bleeding of work-related emails outside of work hours, in a Marxist sense this is exploitative because these emails come to constitute unpaid labour, but on the other hand it has the advantage of being flexible. Consumers often start facing the burden of service, for instance they are required to buy their own plain tickets, to check in, to selecting seats etc. all of which demands their time.

The second major concept that Tomlinson introduces is “legerdemain” or lightness of hand. In the first sense, it is the body-work of touchpads and keyboards that seems effortless, something like gesturing as opposed to real work. This lightness has the capacity of bringing with it associations of immediate accessibility. In the second sense, it is a world of illusion and delusion, like a type of magic that conceals and deceives; the interface is hiding the complexity of the whole.

The baseline promise of immediacy is that “stuff arrives”, and in the manner of a cargo cult consumer use attains a casualness and even thoughtlessness. Finally, there are political and environmental costs to all of this because these media do not penetrate everywhere and are not accessible by anyone. There is also a sense that there is no broader narrative for current features of speed, unlike during the machine age when a strong narrative of speed operated on the assumption that there are disjunctions between home/abroad, now/later and desire/fulfilment. Now there is no gap to close so there is narrative of closure. To conclude, Tomlinson argues for the importance of ensuring that distinctions do not collapse and that one must keep in view the sight that there are broad, cultural-political reasons for us doing what we do.

Mike Crang’s (UK; Lecturer in Cultural Geography at Durham University) more geographically inflected take on spatial and temporal reach examines how to combine the fragmentary pattern of speeds and scales on different places. One must not forget extension, or the spatial distanciation of multiple temporalities. New technical possibilities shape world spaces where “bits [are] over borders”, where patterns of flows are connecting across physical boundaries. Crang showcases various examples of mapping these new realms, e.g. NYTE who map global conversation space from the perspective of New York. (http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/)

He also emphasises the usefulness of drawing out Virilio’s dromo-chrono-politics, which is a way of collapsing distinctions that puts forward the question: what type of governance for ICTs?
GAWC’s world city index maps the propinquity of cities based on the shape of their communications and flight connections, showing that even these new forms build on old connectivities, especially those of colonial origins. One can also talk of the production of centrality, for instance when hub airports become gateways like in the case of the Helsinki – of itself it is not a big airport, but by virtue of its good Far East connectivity it can characterise itself as a major gate. Sekula also notes that we must not forget the sea as transport space: most global steamer routes haven’t changed much in fact, and these are mostly how as Tomlinson would put it “stuff arrives” as if by magic.
Crang devotes some time to the space of chronopolitics. This is to mean the way in which cities “shut down” at different times; time, in fact, is populated by different chronopolitical topographies. Crang proposes a typology of spatial and temporal fixings, which also involve social coercion. Flexible space involves trading on the real spaces of poor countries, for instance when New York time is transposed to Hyderabad where employees must use various locational masking techniques –
as well as working at inconvenient times of day – in order to service their employer.

Next, Carmen Leccardi (IT; Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca) takes a broadly philosophical approach to the restructuring of time. Her key terms are detemporalisation and acceleration society, which she compliments by a consideration of the ways in which “young people” bring into being new notions of time by engaging in anti-globalisation movements and new ways of constructing biographies. Taking her cue from Rosa, Leccardi defines acceleration society according to its three motors – economic (profit driven, neoliberal), cultural (need for experiences) and structural (rhythms of social change). Aside from this, it encompasses three levels: technological, political meaning and the role of social change, what she conceives of as the different meanings of institutions (which could constitute a point of contention because one might want to keep an analytical distance from the meaning of social change and institutional realities). Rosa’s “acceleration society” traces how technological acceleration means that time is growing in scarcity which manifests as a contradiction shaping our lives. Thus, how can we build civic space?

Leccardi spends time on the reconsideration of the idea of the future. Lübbe’s monster term of “Gegenwartsschrumpfung” – the contraction of the present – means that the present is not available for use and one must rely on the future for conceptual package. The building of identities in this interface is challenging, as it is the situation in question and not the over-all life-plan that matters in the end. Again, there might be some rigidity in Leccardi’s notion of these two; she seems to think of them in terms of their reflection in institutions and as their own separate spheres which tend not to interact.

Her guiding term “detemporalisation” means that time loses the character of being a dimension of experience, that the sense of duration is reshaped and operates in relation to the future. The unpredictability of the future is making life-plans irrelevant, therefore the “young people” of today are rather learning to act flexibly and contingently. She enlists two examples of this. First, antiglobalisation movements are resisting the violence of time/space commodification, think in terms of values and re-establish the connection between cause and effect in what is happening. The second feature are biographical constructions, which are concerned with mediating unpredictability and developing responses that neutralise fears of the future. I think that there might be more flexible ways of considering how notions of time are changing than simply from institutionalised to a non-life-plan. Be that as it may, Leccardi rounds up the first session of general introductions to the notions of speed from the perspectives of different academic disciplines.

After lunch, there is a change of moderation as well as an inexplicable change in the order of the talks. Stamatia Portanova speaks before Steve Goodman, who, due to the moderator’s confusion about the timeframes had his lecture cut tantalisingly short. This session begins to showcase talks of more specific inflection – as concerns choreography, music and visual perception.

Stamatia Portanova’s (IT; PhD in Digital Cultures at East London University) talk proposes a redefinition of the digital age as a neo-Baroque age. Her dense, dextrous presentation dealt with Bifo’s manifesto for a postfuturist age (http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848). Using futurist notions of time and movement as points of departure, she investigates more corporate conceptions of rhythm and topography. Movement is a sensation not a perception. Sensation is a vibratory wave crossing through bodies. As the body becomes a framer of spatial information in media interface, the liberation of the body is a biophilosophy that turns towards the affect, or embodied aesthetics. Intensity is understood as Deleuzian desire; an energy that is in itself and not for something. Aesthetic style with its technological present is controlling the body possible and creating a different ontology: Deleuzian desire and ICTs interfacing in the creation of energy as information. The digital is an idea, a concept before becoming reality. In this it is attuned to the Baroque in its striving for dissection, for a microscopic notion particles and the technological idea of the cut. Portanova’s contention is that we can find an openness in technology that is not only dependent on the imitation of life. Chronological and metric notions of time can allow us to imagine an infinite succession of time that is alive.

Steve Goodman’s (UK; teaches Sonic Cultures at East London University) talk was badly interrupted, so the promised exposition of the concept of speed tribes and the development of music cultures did not manifest. Even so, his brief talk was beautifully evocative of the forthcoming book “Sonic Warfare” (2009). Like Portanova, he begins by departing from Bifo’s provocation; how is it possible that futurism could become passé? He proposes a consideration sonic ecology, the competing corporate and grassroots initiatives in contemporary sonic culture. By contrasting futurism with afrofuturism, he is tracing the things that could be retained of futurism. Afrofuturism presents more complex ideas of speed than futurism’s god of speed. The sonic warfare concept is evoking the art of war in the art of noise. Afrofuturism is a colonised culture’s way of striking back through sound. As expounded by Kodwo Eshun in his “More Brilliant Than The Sun” (1997), it is a nexus of black musical expression, the city and the cybernetic in electronic music. Eshun’s concept of the future rhythm machine evokes the sensual mathematics of music as non-conscious counting. Afrofuturism is rewiring alienated experience through urban machine musics, presenting a landscape that extends into possibility space. Simon Reynolds’ description of the dystopic metropolis of warrior clans and robber corporations creating a city as a warzone and ecologies of dread in the 90s wanted to examine the intersection of underdevelopment, technology and race in the city, thus attains a different type of futurity. In contrast to Marinetti’s and Russolo’s unilinear notion of history with its white metallicist Übermensch, Eshun’s afrofuturism is polyrhythmnic, bred from cyclical discontinuity, aligning the future paradoxically. In the intersection of roots and futurism, memories are those of the future – the future scifi alien abduction actually happened in the past when black people were subjected to slavery! According to this, the sonic avant-garde of high modernism were actually afraid of rhythm. At this point, Goodman is forces to “skip about 20 pages” and concludes that in view of corporate co-option of musics, afrofuturism is not necessarily scifi but has proliferated as something that – aside from selling record – has the capability of affectively mobilise people.

Dirk de Bruyn’s (NL/AU; Senior Lecturer in Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Melbourne) lecture dealt with the “after-image as a traumatic event” by using Prensky’s distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants as a way of tracing out inherencies in the way that people tend to interact with the medium and Brewin’s notions of VAM (verbally accessible memory) which deals with the context and SAM (situationally accessible memory) which deals with perception. These always intermix; the categories are not useful so rigidly. Flusser’s notion that “we all are immigrants now” repositions the migrant experience as that of globalisation itself. This has impact on our relation to technical literacy: we remain illiterate if not engaging in criticism of technical images. The issue is about how to critique technologically mediated images on their own terms, by the realignment of senses as in the case of the perceptual apparatus adjusting and sometimes fooling the viewer.

The final session could be said to attain to a type of microspecificity, first in relation to maps in video games such as Civilisation and Charlie Gere’s talk which managed not to consider nothing related to digital media, or the 21st century for that matter. This was followed by a presentation of two artworks by two British artists operating in the ambiguous interface between visual art and online media.

Sybille Lammes (NL; Assistant Professor of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University) spoke of gameplay and digital ludic cartographies. In particular, she explored the changeable status of minimaps in gameplay with recourse to De Certeau’s and Latour’s concepts. Is there something at stake in what games do to analogue maps? De Certeau’s notion of spatial stories – of touring – contrasts with the rigidity of mapping especially after the Renaissance period. In the middle age, the two senses were fuse: a map would show a place as well as an “experience” or a perception of it. Such touring traces are performative iterations. In games, minimaps are looked at and altered by the player as a way of exploring vast spaces. Further, Latour’s “immutable mobiles” concept provides a way of describing the image as technology: it can be moved around but still depends on inscription. The player is a mediator, mutating the map by tactically interacting with space but also constantly erasing earlier versions, or inscriptions.

Charlier Gere (UK; teaches New Media Research at the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University), for the whole of his lecture on ecology and messianic time, did not address much of anything to do with new media. In stead, his concern was to trace out Ruskin’s complex relationship with environmental issues to the point of the latter’s positive theophany of nature. In his soi-disant “vicar mode”, Gere was continuously on the verge of getting utterly distracted by long quotes from Ruskin peppered by autobiographical jabs at the author’s many odditities and failings. This domain-bridging presentation dealt with an eschatological mode of experiencing nature, through Ruskin’s description of the “messianic/apocalyptic” storm cloud of the 19th century. Via references to Derrida’s spectrality, or the reproducible virtuality of technology, to Agamben’s political ecology of messianic time in reference to Pauline notions of it, he ends up with images of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (the flash of the bomb took “photos”) to Tsernobyl’s radioactive fallout, arguing that invisible radiation is the storm cloud of the 20th century; its messianic narrative. At the end of this complex, flighty and quoty exposition I was left wondering where it is that we are then at the beginning of the 21st century – there are still about 90 years to think up/bring about the apocalyptic storm cloud of digital media and environmental depletion.

To conclude the day, artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (UK) showcased two pieces of their work which deal with data by attempting to represent its two facets: the procuring information and the contrast between live and dead data. The exploration of the materiality of their material is at the crux of their endeavours.

* Beacon takes a live stream from search engines, functioning as a “useless clock”, portrait and a landscape whilst also managing to reveal a particular type of intimacy in people dealing with a search engine.

* A Short Film About War (part of Desktop Documentaries) is a collation of Flickr images and log texts accompanied by blog pieces spoken out loud. The film scrutinises the browsing experience and mediatic war through the net (web 2.0), especially by the use of Collective Commons images. The act of editorial becomes a sort of surrogate browsing experience for this collation of multiple strands of images and stories of war.

Video Vortex V: The Moving Image Online
Location: Atomium, Brussels
20-21 November 2009

Video Vortex V is organized by Cimatics festival 2009 in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and supported by KASK (Faculty of Fine Arts, University College Ghent) and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA).

On November 20-21 2009, Cimatics festival is hosting the 5th Video Vortex conference. Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returns to Brussels, this time hosted in one of the great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture: the Atomium.

The past two years, the conference series - which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet - has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organised network of organisations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

More info:
Conference Programme
Practical information (Location, tickets)
About (about VV, about Cimatics)

By Urte Jurgaityte

On the 2nd of April, 2009, The Amsterdam University of Applied Science (HvA) organized the 5th HvA Education Conference at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam. The conference, with the theme of 'The Learning Community,' started with an informal lunch with about 800 participants. Most of the attendees were HvA employees, (lecturers, staff and management), as well as the research depts. ('lectoraten') such as the Institute of Network Cultures, and labs like MediaLAB Amsterdam. The opening speech by Dymph van den Boom, rector magnificus of the HvA, was followed by the two interesting keynote speakers Trude Maas and René Jansen, who addressed the importance of community building and networking.

In the afternoon, everybody split into small groups to have roundtable discussions about a variety of important topics related to education and research. The roundtables were arranged according to 8 main themes: Learning Community, ICT and Education, Learning the Big City, Young Teachers / Professionalizing, Excellency / Masters, Divergent Perspectives, Study Success, and Environment Awareness.
The Institute of Network Cultures led a discussion about the use and possible value of social networks within higher education, with the title 'Is your EduHyves LinkedIn yet?.' At this roundtable, moderated by Geert Lovink and Paul den Hertog, social networks were discussed from an educational and policy perspective. What could a HvA fabecook be? And should it be accessible for both students and teaching staff? Who is it for? And what are the pitfalls of yet another social networking platform? The outcomes were of great value for the further developments of the HvA social networking tool that Paul den Hertog is designing.
Another roundtable in the 'Learning Community' theme was initiated by three students from the MediaLAB Amsterdam. Daphne Gautier, Rochus Meijer and me were responsible for a discussion about Open Courseware. We did a short introduction about Open Course Ware at MIT and TU Delft and introduced IAM Open Courseware project. We debated whether the HvA is ready for an open culture in which knowledge sharing could facilitate education, and examined the possibilities of Open Course Ware at HvA.

For more information about the project IAM Open Courseware, see:
http://ocw.medialab.hva.nl/

part 1

Session 2: Search Engines and Power

Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers

Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.

Where does the power of search engines exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes it the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

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This Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid - The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

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The second day of the Video Vortex Ankara conference opened with a panel on Participatory Culture, which started with a presentation by Michael Liegl about Share. Share is a series of jam sessions in NYC (and other cities) that Liegl characterized as multi-modal space, and perceived as a sociological object of study. (http://share.dj/share/). Liegl’s documentary of Share Montreal is available on the Share website.
Martin Koplin presented an interactive storytelling project funded by the EU, called Mobile 2 Culture (M2C): Mobile Media as E-Culture. Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen gave a very interesting talk in which he proposed a distributed video-sharing platform, in which everybody hosts their own video content. As the project is still under development, keep an eye on his blog www.solitude.dk.

Dan Oki and I used the break to discuss the program and preparations for the next Video Vortex event in Split! When we got back into the conference, it was unfortunately quite near the end of Başak Şenova’s talk, which was titled “Navigating in Digital Territories.” The presentation was by videoblogger Michael Verdi, about the topic of Videoblogging as Networked Relationships. In 2004, Verdi’s daughter Dylan was on ABC news, as she was elected as one of the People of the year. The reason? She was the world’s youngest videoblogger. Verdi gave beautiful examples of the powerful medium of online video, and the of the enstrangement it can cause (when recording you don’t know who your audience is, so there’s no specific context other than your own). He also told the story of a couple that got together online, and really got to know eachother through starting a private videoblog where they posted video messages to eachother (-and yes, they are a couple now).
Sarah Késenne presented her research on ‘gig flix’, and compared the multicamera set-up of professionally produced concert registrations (in which the fans are extras, and the footage is often simultaneously recorded and edited), to the amateur footage (often made with mobile phones) available on online video platforms such as YouTube. Her research has been published in the Video Vortex reader, which is available here.
During the Q&A, Dominic Pettman asked Michael Verdi if after the mirror stage, there might be something as a webcam stage? The answer was simple and beautiful: We are outsourcing our memory to a network.

The last panel was about Art Online. The first speaker was Brittany Shoot, a self-proclaimed ‘recovering academic.’ With the strong belief that “sharing is caring”, Shoot has started dvblog.org, an “online resource for art & entertainment movies in QuickTime format”. I can highly recommend it, for it is a non-commercial and highly valuable database of shorts.
Artist and academic Gülsen Bal (http://www.art-axis.org/) talked about her project Folded In, which shows representations of borders in the social networks of Web 2.0. From her website: FOLDED-IN, an online multi-user platform that combines videogame basic elements with the possibility of a constant data flow, addresses the creation of an online community that will not only be part of the game but will create the networking that conveys the world in our absence in its multiplicity.

Dan Oki told a history of new media work, starting with a web project in 2002, in which scenes would be put online, and visitors of the website could start editing. But editing didn’t seem to be enough, they acted as the director too:. People would write to the actors, giving them suggestions, and adding narration. This gave Oki the idea of re-editing the film every time it was shown in a cinema, thus showing the database. Dan Oki ended his talk with his latest project, in which he is tagging his super 8 films. The project is called ‘My last super 8 film.’ A work by Dan Oki was shown in the Video Vortex Ankara exhibition.

Pictures of the event are collected in the Video Vortex Flickr Pool.

Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media was the first international conference of the Centre for Modern Thought at King's College, University of Aberdeen. The centre was founded in 2005 "in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. (...) In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies."

The roots the centre has in all these disciplines shone through in the programme and the outcomes of the Recoded conference. The event had an impressive line-up of speakers from the field of media studies, new media, media archaeology, philosophy, military studies and more. In his introduction, professor Duncan Rice, Principal of the University of Aberdeen, noted that with this conference the Centre for Modern Thought wanted to investigate the changing position of humanities in dealing with new media.

Friedrich Kittler, who opened the event with a keynote lecture, set the tone by starting his attempt to an ontology of the media with Aristotle, as the inventor of philosophical thinking and the one who coined 'the medium' as a thing in itself.

Friedrich Kittler

According to Kittler, this marked an important shift from thinking of the medium as 'in between' to 'the medium'. He stated that McLuhan should have attributed to Aristotle, for without him there would have been no notion of 'the medium'. Kittler argued this marked a beginning of thinking about 'things', but not yet of relations between things in time and space. McLuhan's' "the medium is the message', would have made no sense to Aristotle, for in his time there was no clear disinction between the oral story and its written version. With this notion, Kittler set off into an overview of relationships between things in time and place, in search of a media ontology. Heidegger,who historicized technical media such as the radio, regarded the start of the computer age a marking the end of philosophy. The question then is why philosophy led to the mechanization of thinking, and how mathematics and media theory/philosophy are related.

Kittler wasn't the only one who took the audience back to the ancient Greek. Throughout the conference, many speakers would seek the boundaries of new media in stretching the notion of 'media', instead of focusing on the 'new' in new media, let alone the digital. This was quite striking to the new media researchers who participated in the conference (including myself), who expected maybe an exploration of "the new" or the digital, rather than revisiting "the medium". If there would be an essential guide to new media from a modern thought perspective, it would include a lot of (Greek) philosophy.

The event had very interesting highlights, that I'd like to describe in more detail. One of these highlights was the surveillance and military thread throughout the event, which included two panels and screenings of Peter Galison's new documentary Secrecy.

The Societies of Surveillance panel, which was moderated by blogger and curator Régine Debatty, started this strand with presentations about military secrecy. Trevor Paglen, investigative journalist and author of many books on state secrets such as Torture Taxi: On the trail of the CIA's rendition flights (2007), held an intriguing presentation titled "Blank spots on a map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible." His talk dealt with the world of state secrets, called "the back world" funded from "the black budget" hidden from public publications. The metaphor of dark matter refers to something invisible but with effect on the visible universe. With an approach that combines investigative journalism, plane spotting (if you have tail data of cia planes, you can retrieve flight data from the Web), and landscape photography (recording black sites at extreme distances), Paglen opened up ideas about research methods and approaches. Two of his projects that really stand out are "I could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me" a collection of emblems and patches from the Pentagon's black world, that were bundled in a book, and "terminal Air". Terminal Air is an installation that attempts to envision the CIA office cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia from which the Extraordinary Rendition Program—an initiative through which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation—is presumably coordinated. It is a project by by the Institute for Applied Autonomy and Trevor Paglen http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html. Other speakers on this panel: Julia Scher and Kris Ravetto.
Trevor Paglen

The second session was titled New Media Technology and the Body Politic, which included a fascinating presentation by Thomas Keenan. He raised an important issue from the field of human rights. He asked when violence is legitimate to protect a place from violence. He referred to the journalist George Packer's article "The Revolution will not be blogged" (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/05/04_200.html), in which he argues that journalists and readers need to get out of their pyjamas (referring to bloggers). He states that previously (in traditional media coverage) reality preceeded the media coverage, taping, transmitting, publishing. But with blogging the instant news is often wrong. But but now what? What with things that happen on screen, things that wouldn't happen without a camera? Keenan refers to terrorist events that occur and are simultaneously televized, blogged and published, ad disagrees with Packer. He pointed out that the jihadi media landscape has two basic units: the threaded discussion forum (links to videotapes are "highest objects" in these posts), and the uploaded videos. This means that the Jihadi battlefield also takes place on an immaterial level (on screen). Here I'd like to point out the work of Albert Benschop, a sociologist working at the University of Amsterdam, who has published widely on the topic of the Jihad on the Web.

After the last panel of the day, we all headed off to the Belmont Picture House, where the film Secrecy was screened. This documentary, made by Peter Galison and Rob Moss in 2007, is a collection of interviews with a group of experts, varying from secret agencies (such as a former CIA agent and a National Security Agency veteran, dedicated to protecting secret information), victims of secrecy (who argue that state secrecy leads to an uninformed nation), and investigative journalists (who of course try to reveal secrets). http://www.secrecyfilm.com/
The article "Removing Knowledge" by Peter Galison, co-director of SECRECY, on the subject of government secrecy which appeared in the academic journal Critical Inquiry in 2004, is also available online. "The article describes the increasing size and scope of the secrecy system which developed in the United States during the Cold War, looking at both the practical, historical, and epistemological implications of the every-increasing regime of classified knowledge." (Source: http://www.secrecyfilm.com/resources/)

By Roman Tol

On April 17th and 18th 2008 the department of Politics and International Relations at the Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) organized Politics: Web 2.0: an international conference. The conference was large and diverse, with six distinguished keynotes, 120 papers organized into 41 panels, and over 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries. The big star of the conference was…. You!

Of course we all remember winning the TIME’s Person of the year award in 2006 for seizing the reins of the global media and, whilst working for nothing, founding the new digital democracy. TIME rightly observed a new trend in the Web – a shift that allows for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. We call it Web 2.0.

Web 2.0, coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004, is the idea of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by dynamic information sharing and creation. Web 2.0 includes all those Internet utilities and services which can be modified by users whether in its content (adding, changing or deleting- information or associating metadata with the existing information), or how to display them, or in content and external aspect simultaneously. The user generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the million-channel people's network YouTube and online social network conurbations such as Facebook and MySpace are a mere few examples of the new web direction.

Though it may not be obvious, the road marks in Web 2.0 are political: grassroots participation, forging new connections, and empowering from the ground up. The ideal democratic process is participatory and Web 2.0 is about democratizing digital technology. It may therefore be relevant to ask if there has been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media - a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values. Moreover, how do broader social, cultural, and economic shift towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Essentially, does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship?

After an hour travel from London I arrived in Egham, a small town in the Runnymede borough of Surrey, in the south-east of England. The picturesque houses of Egham are home for a population of six thousand people. Just outside Egham is the Royal Holloway University of London which caters eight thousand students. The campus, which is set in 55 hectares of parkland, is dominated by its original building, known as the "Founder's Building", designed by William Henry Crossland and inspired by the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, France.

The department of Politics and International relations, Andrew Chadwick (Director) explains in the opening speech of the conference, was created to study the ‘new’ in new media technologies, such as the Internet, mobile technologies, and global TV. The main issue with new media phenomena is that they get over estimated in the short term and drastically underestimated in the long term. It is therefore essential to analyze and research changes in the Web without delay. The current accent of the web seems to be on social networking and sharing. Its success hints at possibilities for a working political and social system based on mutual respect for each other's cultures, free of prejudice.

This article is divided in two sections: firstly I will discuss the keynote speakers; then in the second half I will discuss six case-studies. The article will be wrapped up with a short conclusion including comments on the overall event.

The keynote presentations include:

• Professor Rachel Gibson – Trickle-up Politics? The Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on citizen participation.
• Micah Sifry – The Revolution will be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.
• Professor Robin Mansell – The Light and the Dark Sides of Web 2.0
• Professor Helen Margetts – Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co- creation and the Future of Government.

The case-studies include:

• Severine Arsene – Web 2.0 in China: the collaborative development of citizen’s rational discussion and its limits.
• Cuiming Pang – Self-censorship and the rise of cyber-organizations: an anthropological study of Chinese online community.
• Maura Conway & Lisa McInerney – Broadcast Yourself: A History & Categorization of Terrorist Video Propaganda.
• Kostas Zafiropoulos and Vasiliki Vrana – An exploration of political blogging in Greece
• Paul Zube – VulnerableSpace: A comparison of 2008 Official Campaign Websites and MySpace.
• Rebecca Hayes – Reaching out on their own turf: Social networking sites and Campaign 2008.

PART 1 – KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

BLURRING AND EMERGING TRENDS
Professor Rachel Gibson’s presentation ‘Trickle-politics?’ concerned the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on political communication and citizen participation. ‘Trickle-up politics’ in fact refers to Reagan/Bush’s ‘trickle-down’ economic policy - which is used in political rhetoric to classify economic policies perceived to primarily benefit the wealthy and then ‘trickle-down’ to the middle and lower classes. What Rachel means with trickle-up is a bottom-up tactic, referring to the deregulated, decentralized political space that is the web. Rachel’s talk was particularly interesting because she set-out a concise historical trajectory to define the present-day web/politics.

Politics before the web – early 20th century through to WWII – can be characterized as being direct, localized and face-to-face. The town meeting, for instance, used to be an effective intermediate. In fact, Rachel continues, politics at this time had a ‘live’ quality, the emphasis was on a confrontation ‘in the flesh’. Politics gradually became more mediated and indirect between WWII and the turn of the century. With advancement in electronic mass media, the position of the mediator increasingly became independent and subjective, as well as a critical factor in the election outcome. Hence, personality driven candidates have become vital in persuading publics to vote for a party, consequently parties lost their supremacy. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats in the 1930’s and the first televised presidential debate in 1960 - John F. Kennedy versus Richard Nixon – are two defining moments, or as Rachel calls them, seeds of change.

In the period between 1990 and 2004 the Internet progressively became a consumer friendly domestic commodity, and with it political communication found a new medium, one with a potential to evade sound-bites and negative ads. Of course the Internet had a long history prior to the emergence of the WWW. It is debatable when exactly the WWW was invented, however, one common date is 1990 when TBL published ‘Proposal for a hypertext project’. The immediate consequence for political communication was an increase in speed, volume, and individual user control over consumption and production. Moreover, it provided a new way of targeting and allowed for ‘narrowcasting’. The internet opened a decentralized control structure and offered the user new forms of interactivity, putting an accent on multi-media formats.

The expectations were high; in ‘The Virtual Community’ (1993) Howard Rheingold wrote that “the future of the Net is connected to the future of community, democracy, education, science and intellectual life… The political significance of CMC lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful commercial media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy.” Nicholas Negroponte wrote in ‘Being Digital’ (1995) that “as we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. [there is] …A decentralized mindset growing in our society, driven by young citizenry in the digital world. The traditional centralist view of life will become a thing of the past.”

And in 1998 Esther Dyson wrote in ‘Release 2.1: a design for living in the digital age’ that for her “the great hope of the Net is that more and more people will be led to get involved with it, and that using it will change their overall experience of life… The Internet is a powerful lever for people to use to accomplish their own goals in collaboration with other people. Its more than a source of information, it’s a way for people to organize themselves. It gives them power for themselves. Rather than over others.”

But, then, what did all this buoyancy bring forth? Rachel answers by showing slides of Tony Blair's incredibly meager home page from 1995, plus some other laugh-raising political campaign sites familiar to British voters. Obviously it takes time to master technological innovation, Rachel notes. Then, in 2004, came web 2.0. The technological definition of Web 2.0 is that the web functions as a platform, supplanting the desktop and PC. The browser is now the key tool to access a suite of new increasingly interoperable applications that work behind the scenes to link up a wide range of online functionalities – i.e. manage a home page.

At its core, this frame refers to social and participatory elements of the web: communicate with friends, share/publish pictures, and receive news. Web 2.0 is based around social networking activities as it relies on and is built trough ‘social or participatory’ software. Typical applications are blogs, wikis, social networking and file sharing sites, such as Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. Hallmark of these applications is the way in which they devolve creative and classificatory power to ‘ordinary’ users. In a nutshell Web 2.0, as defined by blogger Nicholas Carr, concerns “the distribution of production into the hands of the many”.

But what does it mean for politics? It is more and more difficult to identify media ‘effects’ at the individual and collective/societal level. We therefore need new methods and data to capture how and why people are using the technology. The Web is becoming an ‘environment’ and a context. Where it is probably having most effect is in changing the culture of participation particularly among younger people. However, Rachel argues, we are not at the stage yet where we can definitively point to changes in citizen participation. Yet, there are significant signs of a shift taking place coming from recent elections in the US, France, Australia and beyond.

Emergent trends include the blurring of boundaries between users and producers, causing what Rachel calls an ‘amateurization’ of politics. On the other hand politics is speeded up; Rachel observes a ‘quickening’ of coordinating citizen demands and responses, fostered by tools like MySociety and Central Desktop, hopefully leading to a more open form of decision making. In addition, the boundaries between public and private are blurring, which causes an ‘informalizing’ of politics. Furthermore, Rachel notes a pluralizing and disaggregating of choices, hinting at a long tail of politics. In politics the long tail has been talked about in terms of tapping small donors, but she argues that it also applies to people's discrete interests and the opportunity to respond to more than the top four survey items in a poll.

In this sense, Rachel’s ‘trickle-up politics’ refers to diffused and decentralized individualistic micro-networks that are continuous, citizen-based in a non-institutional setting, and characterized by niche audiences. So, where do we go from here? While we ponder the nature of politics associated with the Web 2.0 era it is interesting to think about what the next shift might be. Web 3.0? If Web 1.0 relates to a receive/read mode and Web 2.0 includes a send/write mode (user generated content), then Web 3.0 could very well be, Rachel reasons, a more immersive mode, for instance create/speak/act. So, does this mean we will all be having avatar-to-avatar fire-side chats with upcoming politicians in Second/Third Life?

POLITICS 2.0 – OPEN SOURCE CAMPAIGNING
Since the 2004 United States elections, the internet has become much more participatory and interactive with the popularization of Web 2.0. This participation, the idea goes, lends new currency to the notion that these technologies can be employed to allow citizens to ‘reprogram’ politics. One of the earliest examples is the way that the Macaca video spread virally through the internet on YouTube and contributed to the electoral defeat of Senator George Allen of Virginia during the 2006 U.S. midterm elections. The old ethics of politics allowed candidates to get away with making ad lib comments if journalists did not pick up on them, but services such as YouTube have changed that, and now politicians must be more careful not to say things that will come back to haunt them.

Various Internet prophecies involve a new wave of fashionable democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do opponent research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold mini conventions in Second Life. Open source political campaigns, Open source politics, or Politics 2.0 are about the idea that social networking and e-participation technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns.

In The Nation (2004) Micah Sifry wrote open source politics means "opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing." Since Micah’s article, the term has appeared on numerous blogs and print articles. Micah was invited to talk about open source politics and how it relates to this years US presidential election.

Micah’s perspective on politics and the revolutionizing authority assigned to the network, provided for some fascinating insights. According to Micah political communications must move from being egocentric to network centric; less about individuals and more about loosely connected networks of supporters that unite and self-organize around specific issues, allowing voters to become co-creators of the political campaign and outcome. Micah’s presentation was named ‘the revolution will be networked’ and concerned voter-generated content, donations, and a potential retreat from sound bites (or the even shorter sound ‘barks’).

Because of the interactive quality of modern campaign sites (comments, polls, upload options), users currently are co-creators of campaigns. This network of users, Micah argues, makes modern campaigns not solely about getting donations or votes; issues can be discussed in depth. Obama’s top 10 YouTube clips are on average 13 minutes long (with approximately 900 videos posted). These videos get millions of hits, which is unique because YouTube only registers a hit when the video is watched completely. The Race Video has had over four million views, demonstrating that there are a lot of people interested in in-depth content that without the Internet cannot be obtained.

The Internet opens up meaningful spaces and changes traditional processes. For instance funding is done in new ways; Ron Paul opened up his funds by putting all his campaign donations online. The database of donations was entirely searchable. Supporters started expanding the site with useful tools, for instance, graphs that displayed funding from specific places, organizations or persons – they then set-up the website ronpaulgraphs.com; the result can be considered a form of open source donors in real-time. With micro-economics emerging on the web, big money doesn’t go away – but now there is a counter force. The mobilizing force of the internet allows for a long tail of donations, potentially assigning power to the people. Those who are only able to donate a small amount and thus generally have little or no authority, can mobilize via network technologies and have a say at what direction a candidate’s party should take, as an alternative to the established domination of the corporation.

The voter generated content, Micah emphasizes, is not solely about raising funds; the contributions extend to full scale voluntary operations. Great examples are "Vote Different" video from Obama supporters and the new "VoterVoter" site, where citizens can develop their own ad and pay to have it placed on TV. Micah believes there is a shift in centrality; the focus is on the user. This shift is evident in the importance of MySociety.org and its toolset for citizens to monitor and exert pressure on government. Obama seems to understand the network power better than the other candidates before him and still in the race; his campaign site is all about providing a channel or a portal to other users and sites, not necessarily trying to control them. The heart is the user.

To get to a position of open source politics we need to give supporters authority. To what extent is this achievable and smart? Ron Paul supporters were given full authority to shape his campaign, but then they raised money to spend on a branded blimp – as it turned out not the most efficient course. A more interesting question is what happens to the network and peer production after the candidate is placed in office? And where will the balance of power lie? Once you have given supporters/voters a sense of power, they probably won’t let it go so easily. The speeding up of politics: this quickening of coordinated citizen demands and responses, fostered by tools like MySociety or Central Desktop, will this lead to more open decision making? What about collaborative government?

ROAD TO ENLIGHTMENT OR CONFUSION?
According to Professor Robin Mansell (New Media – London School of Economics) we are on our way to collective intelligence. The Web 2.0 ideology demonstrates a new narrative and an end of hierarchies. The new narrative, which is put forth from end-to-end networks, is an astonishing emphasis on cooperation ascendant over competition. Information wants to be free.

When thinking about technology from a bureaucratic or a scientific perspective, it is important to ask if convergent and divergent interests in capitalism and democratization are characterized by superficial or fundamental change. Robin notes that historically, shifts in power have been partial and often local, in their consequences we should expect the same in the Web 2.0 age. In order to study ongoing transitions and affect Robin sets out the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side of Web 2.0. Her presentation was not so much an attempt to close things down and determine all facets of the Web 2.0 phenomenon; but instead aimed to stimulate speculation, further empirical research and a call for governmental involvement.

The success and achievability of Web 2.0 can be explained by steady increases in information connections and social connections over the past decades. Historically the web can be grouped in the PC Era (1980-’90), Web 1.0 (1990-2000), and Web 2.0 (2000-’10). The PC Era commenced as PC’s and in particular the desktop became a household commodity, however, the stand alone character of the PC made it lack information and social connections. Web 1.0 is identifiable by the World Wide Web and although there is an increase in social and information connections, the web is still, at this stage, focused on databases, static websites and one-way communication. Web 2.0, on the other hand, does have a strong focus on user-generated content and social media sharing. Assuming this trend will continue, the upcoming Web 3.0 (2010-’20) is thought to focus on semantic databases and distributed search and Web 4.0 (2020-’30) characterized by intelligent personal agents.

Today, being profitable on the Internet means reliance on user-generated content. Large multi-nationals have come to understand the power of the mass; by winning them over with innovative interactive tools and integrating their creative and immaterial input. Successful businesses respect the small contributions of the multitude and adjust the communication and production structure accordingly; slowly businesses are implementing a horizontal, bottom-up organization. Web 2.0 embodies this change and in this respect stands for the emancipation and an end to repression; everyone’s contributions matter, everyone is listened to and – this is different in a traditional disciplinary organization – you are stimulated to actively participate/volunteer in fine-tuning the social/corporate order.

At first glance Web 2.0 primarily seems to be about upbeat, optimistic and emancipatory qualities. However, there are a lot of negative aspects to be considered in the same way. It is for instance an addiction that consents to collective intelligence; mass collaboration is achieved by encouraging people to get addicted to new media practices. Children, adults and the elderly need to be active in order to belong to the ‘new society’. Those that do not contribute and participate are automatically excluded. All our daily practices slowly seem to be reliant on new media technologies. Being part means to be addicted.

Currently active audiences are participating in television shows via SMS, speaking out their every day frustrations on blogs and tweaking their profiles on social networks. What this brings, however, are new forms of competition. Companies are competing in who has the most people working voluntarily for them. This obviously raises juridical questions concerning labor and compensation. In addition, Robin continues, mass collaboration mostly occurs within a circle of friends. This means that the focus is inward looking and therefore not as open as many optimists proclaim. Furthermore, Robin notes, adverts increasingly get mixed with editorials. Trust is devaluated by an overload of information. The gatekeepers of information, the editors, moderators and monitors are ‘you’; hence it is increasingly difficult to dependent on one source. Mass collaboration might be a way to collective intelligence; it is predictably also a road to mass confusion.

In the end the scarce resource is data/info management capabilities and time for servicing ourselves. What we need, Robin asserts, is more speculation and empirical research; a turn to governance of communicative spaces in ways that encourage active passivity; a turn to achieve control over data/info management – the driver of the economy, Web X.0 and political outcomes. Bottom line is to understand that network effects are not neutral for the economy or for democratization.

DIGITAL ERA GOVERNANCE
In the public administration debate about new public management (NPM), Professor Helen Margetts (Society and Internet, OLL, UK) claims traditional themes of disaggregation, competition, and ‘incentivization’ are worn out. Although its effects are still working through in countries new to NPM, this wave has now largely stalled or been reversed. Helen sets out the case that a range of connected and information technology-centered changes will be critical for the current and coming wave of change. The overall movement incorporating these new shifts is toward "digital-era governance" (DEG), which involves reintegrating functions into the governmental sphere, adopting holistic and needs-oriented structures, and progressing digitalization of administrative processes.

DEG has three key elements - reintegration (reversing fragmentation, joining up, re-governmentalization, new central processes, squeezing process costs, simplification, bringing issues back into government control, like US airport security after 9/11); needs-based holism (client-focused structures, end-to-end redesign, one-stop processes, co-production, agile government, reorganizing government around distinct client groups); and digitalization (electronic delivery, centralized procurement, new automation, disintermediation, open-book governance, web2.0 for government, fully exploiting the potential of digital storage and Internet communications to transform governance). DEG offers a perhaps unique opportunity to create self-sustaining change, in a broad range of closely connected technological, organizational, cultural, and social effects.

The backlash, however, is a move to a digital super state, in which information and organization is chaotic and lagged. Research concerning UK government representation and recognition on the internet shows that users rate government websites reasonably well but quality has improved little since 2002, design is text heavy, public sector sites lack innovation (particularly Web 2.0) and popular features of good private sector sites. Furthermore, Central government websites cost 208m pounds annually (estimated) – but some departments/agencies still have weak information on costs/usage of online provision and many lack channel strategies. UK government has embarked on a high risk ‘super site’ strategy, Helen continues, to centralize e-government provision in two sites – Directgov and Businesslink – which have low brand recognition and problems competing with other information sources.

Helen states management culture for digital-era governance should include the use of pervasive information; it needs to de-couple information analysis from control (contrast to targets-based culture); be customer orientation and segmentation, with attention to channel strategy; and use pro active and experimental tools. A citizen culture for digital-era governance could entail an ‘isocratic’ government which helps citizens do it themselves; stimulate co-production and peer production. Essentially Web 2.0 should run for government.

The only problem with a potential Web 2.0 candidacy is that the cultural vibe in government is that only ‘old-fashioned’ Web is easy to use, and the “government doesn’t do cool”, in fact, “it’s only working if it’s boring” (i.e. all on-line communication is text-based). Governments avoid part-authenticated information and para-state involvement – “we stand alone; we don’t integrate into society’s networks”. The general idea is that people will come to the government site and can be directed to government sources of information.

The risk of Web 1.0 in government is that it ignores young people at peril – internet change is lead by them. Planning for text-only communication, Helen argues, leads to disastrous under-investment. Moreover, people go where they want to go, with increases in competition, a focus on Web 1.0 will bring forth a net loss of visibility for government – loss of ‘nodality’ (information dissemination) as policy tool.

Web 2.0 could provide the government with rich information and content (not just text) – video, pictures, audio, podcasts, high-intensity graphics (e.g. video games). Conventional information asymmetries can be reversed with a highly specific ‘deep’ search. Also, Web 2.0 allows users to play back information about what they do and how they feel. It can offer part-finished products (e.g. part-authenticated information) to leave for e.g. experts outside the government, allowing for co-production, leading to co-creation, and ultimately making users enter the front office. Web 2.0, Helen adds, offers strong customer segmentation – opening space for social networking (peer production) – possibly involving a wide range of organizations – 3rd sector and private firms.

A 2.0 approach in the health sector, for instance, will permit performance data to be freely available, not only leading to peer-production amongst health-experts, but also offering a direct voice for the patient. This may socialize the manager to be customer orientated. So, the patient input replaces controls.

PART 2 CASE STUDIES

In between the theoretical lectures of the keynote speakers, the conference covered 120 case-studies organized into 41 parallel sessions. Naturally it was not viable to attend all 41 panels within the restricted occasion. Still I was able to attend an especially exciting selection. Such as Severine Arsene’s and Cuiming Pang’s talk on collaborative development of citizen’s discussions and self-censorship in China – outlined in the next section.

What's more I will discuss Maura Conway and Lisa McInerney’s research concerning terrorist video broadcasts. After that I will discuss Kostas Zafiropoulos and Vasiliki Vrana’s study of political blogging in Greece. Followed by two sections about social networking sites and its usage in the U.S. 2008 Presidential campaigns; I will write about Paul Zube’s study of what he calls ‘vulnerable spaces’ and Rebecca Hayes’ research results regarding social networking sites. In the last part I will wrap up the article and give commentary on the overall conference.

WEB 2.0 IN CHINA
According to Severine Arsene (Science-Pro/Orange Labs, Paris) 210 million Chinese internet users share and tag videos and make use of Web 2.0 applications. Moreover, with the rise of an urban and connected “middle class”, there are more and more discussions taking place online. The content is mostly concerning cars, flats, salary and dogs – in other words lifestyle and values. More interesting are Severine’s observations from fieldwork and interviews with internet users in Beijing.

Apparently there is a wide range of popular debates on morality issues, corruption and other social scandals, making one wonder how China’s strict censorship rules will adopt. Severine states that between harsh nationalism and moral indignation, self-regulation and responsibility, moderators as well as users are collectively elaborating formal and informal rules of politeness, and setting new criteria of objectivity. Censorship and control might be self-regulating at the time, the question is, to what extent is it an effect of to the top-down decision-making norm that is China?

Closely related to Severine’s talk was Cuiming Pang’s (University of Oslo, Norway) presentation concerning self-censorship and the rise of cyber-organizations. Cuiming’s results were based on an anthropological study of a Chinese online community: Houxi Street. According to Cuiming the broad use of Web 2.0 applications in Chinese cyberspace, has provided a platform for individual exhibition and open communication, created a new type of social participation, and facilitated the proliferation of cyber collectives in recent years. It is evident that collective action is more influential in spreading public opinion and organizing public activities than is separated and unorganized individual action. However, Cuiming adds, when faced with the threat of a more powerful authority, a grassroots collective would possibly become more fragile than the individual, and is liable to compromise in order to avoid complete annihilation

Cuiming’s observation of the Chinese online community and in-depth interviews with informants both on- and offline, tell a story about internet users and internet service providers’ perception of and reactions to the Chinese government’s censorship, especially regarding how they learn, perceive, and practice self-censorship. Cuiming argues that many Chinese cyber collectives organized in the format of online communities tend to withdraw collective rather than fight for free speech when they encounter the government’s censorship. Even though there is a wide range of criticism towards the government’s political suppression, the community managers still learn and practice self-censorship, rather then taking risk to challenge the government authority, for fear of penalties.

In addition, because technical censorship is complicated and expensive, the focus is on soft-censorship. Cuiming calls this social moderation; community managers tend to establish a friendly relationship with ordinary users, and adopt strategies of negotiation and dialogue rather than restrictions and sanctions, to remind users to be cautious of their own behavior. What this brings is users spontaneously helping managers, and collectively maintaining and protecting the community, ultimately making it easier for the government to practice internet censorship (and more difficult to become more democratic). Well, let’s put it this way, Cuiming had to go to Oslo to study Chinese censorship…

A HISTORY & CATEGORIZATION OF TERRORIST VIDEO PROPAGANDA
An interesting approach of the history and categorization of terrorist video propaganda was set out by Maura Conway and Lisa McInerney (Dublin City University, Ireland). Maura and Lisa have observed a trend of violent jihadis and their supporters worldwide that are exploiting internet technology to pursue an extensive and cutting-edge media campaign. Jihadi media outlets are influencing perceptions of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere among large chunks of the Arab population and, increasingly, also further a field. Video products arising out of the Iraq conflict in particular, Maura and Lisa add, are a key asset for jihadist media worldwide, which employ materials produced in/about Iraq to underline their broader message.

Their presentation traced the ‘history’ of video technology and its use by terrorist organizations: from Hezbollah’s use of ‘camera crews’ to record their attacks on IDF troops in South Lebanon in the 1980’s to the ‘martyrdom videos’ produced by Hamas and other organizations in the 1990s, and from the establishment of al-Qaeda’s al-Saha productions to the ‘do-it-yourself’ contributions widely available on YouTube today. Particular attention was given to the types of jihadist video currently being produced and attempt to broadly categorize these.

Maura started by saying there is a relation between the emergence of new technologies and terrorism. For instance the print set off further forms of terrorism, mobilization and propaganda. The television satellite in 1968 enlarged this process. Imagery, a central aspect of television, is far more persuasive. Hezbollah immediately began to use its power, but, and this is an important fact, the power of the press is limited to who owns it, and because Hezbollah could not own its own television station (before Al-Manar, 1991), its power was limited to who showed their actions. Consequently Hezbollah began broadcasting themselves in the 1980s using ‘camera crews’ to record their attacks on IDF troops in South Lebanon. It was the first form of self-broadcasting.

In the late 60s and 70s hijacking attention became an effective means to draw the attention of television stations – i.e. Black September (PLO). The hijacking genre, Maura states, is the central means to propagate awareness within the television medium. Hijacking videos currently, like its medium, stands for the traditional, the old and the past. Hezbollah’s self-broadcasting activities in fact paved the way to its broad application currently on the internet. There is a wide variety of propaganda videos now residing on such channels as YouTube and LiveLeak. Juba Baghdad Sniper, for instance, is a famous example.

Juba is an Iraqi sniper who has his actions filmed. The videos show unaware American soldiers being shot from a large distance. The videos that contain soldiers falling to the ground are the most popular; some of them have been viewed more than 300,000 times. What makes contemporary propaganda videos different from those broadcast via satellite/television is the co-creative value. Many of the Juba videos have been edited by other users in order to enhance the essence, for example by putting a red circle around the victim prior to the shot, or adding a slow motion filter and repeating the moment the bullet hits the soldier. Another common user generated add-on is subtitles (in English), or a written overview of an up to date body count. The Juba videos are modern propaganda videos aimed to convince viewers around the world that Iraq’s people will not give up and in fact are winning the war.

Juba is just one example of an effective Web 2.0 propaganda video. Maura and Lisa have established seven different propaganda video types on the Internet: political statements, beheadings, attack footage, living wills, instructional, memorials, and the music video. The beheading videos popped up since 2004 and are considered new. In the past videos containing such gruesome aspects as stabbing and detaching body parts would not be broadcast via satellite. The global and ostensibly anonymous character of the Internet makes it a medium to rapidly reproduce virtually any type of content. Beheading videos primarily are intended to provoke shock and demonstrate devotion to both local and Western viewers. Similarly the living wills characterize a global aspect; they are meant for an international audience and speak to non-Muslims.

On the other hand instructional videos are mostly Muslim-oriented. The genre can be divided in theological and operational instructions, such as for bomb making and transport systems. The latter category are not always accurate, they often miss vital information. There are videos circulating the internet with directions in how to make an IED, however they will regularly be ineffective when used in combat. Possibly these incorrect videos are placed on the Internet by Americans/Europeans to cause confusion (produced or re-edited in the West), or are spread by people who lack fundamental understanding, but pretend/believe they do.

Also the memorial videos are mainly distributed amongst Muslims. The content acts as a virtual tombstone and is considered to hail the victim. Lastly there is the jihad music video. The style is rap. Some popular videos get more then 125000 hits. The music video, Maura and Lisa assert, is aimed to target the youth in many countries. Not only are users of the Internet commonly younger generations, rap music in general has an international and youth appeal; it acts as a universal fashion.

Maura and Lisa observed that production is becoming more professional and is vastly multiplying. This has to do with advancements in technology and the global participatory quality of the Internet. There are now even dedicated media production units: Al Saha/As Sahas and Islamic state of Iraq (ISI). In addition there is the do-it-yourself amateur on YouTube who collaboratively create videos, branding, mimic each other, and cause rivalry (leading to snipers similar to Juba going into the streets with more successful kills on their name).

Lisa and Maura conclude that there is a diffusion of power downward. Video are integral to Web 2.0, easier to access, highlight targeting of younger generation, and make use of the persuasiveness factor of the image. Web 2.0 makes it that you do not need your own website, now you have multiple platforms at your disposal. Finally, Lisa and Maura note, there has been a big shift these past 40 years; print had little persuasive value and could only reach literate people, satellite television (1968) had far more power but lacked distribution (airing of videos depended on who owns the station) and grass-rooted control, this evolved in a period of 40 years to co-created easy accessible videos in seven established genres.

POLITICS OF BLOGGING IN GREECE
Kostas Zafiropoulos and Vasiliki Vrana (both University of Macedonia) presented an exploration of political blogging in Greece. Their research was based on a sample of 1367 Greek bloggers.

Blogs have the advantage of speedy publication and in socially constructing interpretive frames for understanding current events. Blogs appear to play an increasingly important role as forum of public debate, with knock-on consequences for the media and for politics. In Greece where the ratio of internet users is relatively small there is however an expanding portion of bloggers who comment regularly and have the power to a certain degree and in certain circumstances to trigger off political movements. Based on the relative literature, Kostas and Vasiliki use Technorati.com in order to track Greek political blogs and provide indicators of their popularity and interconnections. Additionally the aim of the case-study was to test whether the hypothesis of Drezner and Farell (2004) - Skewedness of incoming distribution and formations of core blogs - apply for Greek political blogging.

Drezner and Farell argue that blogs with large number of incoming links offer both a means of filtering interesting blog posts from less interesting ones, and a focal point at which bloggers with interesting posts, and potential readers of these posts can coordinate. When less prominent bloggers have an interesting piece of information or point of view that is relevant to a political controversy, they will usually post this on their own blogs. However, they will also often have an incentive to contact one of the large ‘focal point’ blogs, to publicize their posts. The latter may post on the issue with a hyperlink back to the original blog, if the story or point of view is interesting enough, so that the originator of the piece of information receives more readers. In this manner, bloggers with fewer links function as ‘fire alarms’ for focal point blogs, providing new information and links’.

Currently 40% of the Greek population uses Internet (with percentages being higher among young people and men). According to Karampasis (2007, http://ereuna.wordpress.com) blogging started to expand during 2002-2003 in Greece. There are currently 9610 blogs written in Greek, but only 4639 of them are active. The content includes multiple subjects – with an emphasis on personal interests, art and culture, and entertainment (news and political subjects are rarer). The majority receives less than 100 visits daily, and perhaps as a consequence, do not have any advertisements. The typical Greek blogger is a male (64%) with a college education around the age of 30, and lives in Athens (53.1%) , Thessaloniki (12.4%), or resides abroad (11%). Mostly bloggers tend to use the medium for the purpose of keeping a diary, experimenting, taking action while being anonymous, or creating of a community. 38% of the bloggers consider blogging to be a form of journalism, while 51 does not.

The case-study examines the posts of blogs that were about George Papandreou (the former and current President) and Evaggelos Venizelos (contender) during the period prior to the general elections - from September 16 to November 13. The blogs that were examined contained posts linking to the two candidates sites/blogs. Blogs connectivity, closeness and variations over time were the main characteristics of this investigation. In addition, the research discusses skewedness of the blog incoming links distribution and how this is affecting the formation of central or core blog groups, which serve as focal point blogs. Central in the methodology was recording blogs (from friends and followers, party members, dedicated blogs, non political commenting), link from blog rolls, and affiliation of blogs.

The results, Kostas and Vasiliki argue, demonstrate that political blogging in Greece although limited, conforms to the characteristics described in the literature regarding political blogging. Blogs may frame political debates and create focal points for the new media as a whole. In this way, blogs sometimes have real political consequences, given the relatively low number of blog readers in the overall population. Skewedness of incoming links distribution and the formation of core blogs have on the provision of information and discussion. Empirical evidence from Drezner and Farell is also reproduced in the present analysis. Greek political blogs act within a social network of blogs, which form authority core groups where the discussion is taking place. Political affiliation is partly reflected on the formation of blog core groups. Because of this, it is easier for citizens that need information to coordinate and find where the interesting debate is taking place.

MESSAGE AND IMAGE CONTROL ON MYSPACE
Each election provides researchers studying politics with rewarding material, especially in the last decade; in each election political candidates have made use of new web technologies to reach out to voters. With the 2008 U.S. presidential election looming, Paul Zube states, it appears that social networking sites (SNS) will be the newest web tool utilized by candidates.

Paul’s research examines the ways in which campaigns are making use of one particular SNS, MySpace. MySpace is a popular SNS in the U.S. with a relatively young population of users. This represents an interesting strategic move by U.S. candidates as they have traditionally put little effort into courting young voters, especially as young voters are infrequent visitors of the polls. To study how candidates are using MySpace, two approaches were used. First, the 14 candidates that had active MySpace accounts in the spring of 2007 were “friended” by the researcher to allow full access to the candidates’ spaces. The MySpace and official website spaces of these 14 candidates were then frequently observed during a one month period. Particular attention was paid to differences in content and useable site features. In addition to this comparison, the comments posted on cadidates’ MySpace pages were analyzed. This, Paul adds, provides a glimpse into the potential interactivity promise of SNSs.

The results of these methods found that there are significant differences between the official website presence and the MySpace presence of candidates. The use of MySpace seems to represent a relinquishing of control by campaigns. Although this may be encouraging for those interested in the deals of democratic governance, it is a counterintuitive strategy for the candidates. Candidates have historically sought the maximum electoral benefit from the minimum image/message risk; whereas, SNSs seem to represent a great risk with potentially very little electoral benefit.

Paul start by explaining how the candidates website traditionally acts as a surfacing stage, allowing the candidate to become visible, create a name recognition, establish a personalized image, spread the core message, and ultimately call for funds and votes. At the same time the level of control allows the website to avoid early miscues and build the moment.

Paul believes there are plausible reasons to assume that SNS might be different from previous web campaign tools. Namely, campaigns are not directly in control of structure, moreover, SNS acts as a 3rd party management. Also, the Web 2.0 character makes it difficult to control content supplied by users, meaning that also the interaction with candidates is not filtered. So, is message control compromised in MySpace? Paul asks.

There are several differences between website and MySpace to be considered. Websites are business as usual, Paul says. They are about informing, mobilizing and engaging. Websites are polished and professional. MySpace on the other hand is near uniformity in layout, it contains sporadic content and is non-informing. MySpace is similar but more image focused and the information is personal.

Commenting is an essential part of MySpace and SNSs alike. Paul has established five types of contents: gratitude alone (thanking for accepting ‘friendship’), support (“I am glad you are running), intention to act (“I will vote for you”, challenge (explain such and so - which is never answered by candidate or other users), and spam. The latter actually has initiated some embarrassing situations for candidates; for instance spam adverts concerning illegal drugs are out of place on the site of a candidate who is running a strong anti-drug policy. This and the unfiltered user generated content place candidates at significant risk, making Paul wonder why candidates draw on MySpace.

Candidates jump from one medium to another constantly, yet the challenge of spreading the candidate’s message and image seems minimally rewarded. Not all “friends” on SNSs can vote and MySpace especially has demographics skew very young. History says, Paul adds, they will not vote nor contribute. Candidates seem to use the SNS medium, Paul concludes, to “stay trendy”, it is what is expected of the constituents. Accordingly there seems no motivation by candidates to use the medium for grass-rooted decision making or augmenting democracy, they are simply in it for the votes.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND U.S. CAMPAIGN 2008
Following Paul’s presentation, Rebecca Hayes (Michigan State University) talked about social networking sites and its usage to reach out to younger audiences. Internet social networking sites are becoming an active forum for participation in politics in the United States, with nearly every candidate in the 2008 presidential primary having a profile on the major SNSs of Facebook and MySpace. One of the main demographics of these sites, individuals aged 18-24, is known to be largely apathetic towards the political process and has previously demonstrated a low level of engagement in politics. While candidates are obviously expending significant resources to reach out to these young voters online, through both SNSs and Web Sites, little is known about the attitudes of this group towards these attempts and how they may impact intention to vote.

Voters are most likely to establish political attitudes and habits, Rebecca continues, by the end of their college careers. For an attitude to form and internalize towards voting or a candidate, the source of the information the attitude is based on must be credible. Additionally, to promote civic participation, an individual must possess political information efficacy, the belief that one has the knowledge to participate. In order to determine the attitudes of young voters (18-24) toward presidential candidate presence on social networking sites and to take the first steps toward determining whether exposure to candidate SNSs can increase participation of young voters, she (together with Paul Zube and Thomas Isaacson) studied the Facebook and MySpace profiles and Web sites of six candidates.

Before explaining how the study was conducted, Rebecca shortly explains that U.S. publics are historically inactive voters. In fact 21-51% of eligible voters actually vote. This mainly originates from constituents to be uniformed; for instance, age relevant information is lacking in campaigns. Other reasons, Rebecca adds, are apathy and voters being too online centric. This might shift as campaigns are more focused on social networking sites, consequently reaching out to young voters, web users becoming more likely to vote and be informed. The web is becoming more interactive per election; in 1996 websites were brochure-like, now they are very interactive and socially networked sites (i.e. John McCain’s site is surprisingly interactive). So, will this translate into greater participation by young voters?

The research followed two theoretical models: the Elaboration Likelihood Model – which describes how attitudes are formed and changed along an elaboration continuum (low-high) – and Political Information Efficacy (PIE) – which asserts that one possesses the knowledge to effectively engage in politics; those with low political information efficacy are much likely to vote; younger voters have much lower PIE than older voters; and exposure to, and interaction with, interactive web campaign material can increase PIE.

Therefore, possible hypothesis include that politically uninvolved young people will find candidate social networking profiles more credible sources of information than will politically involved young people. That heavy users of social networking sites will consider them a more credible source of candidate information. That exposure to candidate social networking profiles will increase intention to vote among politically uninvolved young people. And that exposure to candidate social networking profiles will increase political information efficacy among young people.

The researchers designed an online post-test experiment with control, which measures of the SNS use, the intention to Vote, and the exposure to Face Book, MySpace, Websites, or the control. Additionally experimental groups were asked about impressions of treatment in closed-ended questions and using validated scales of interest/involvement, credibility and PIE. Furthermore, the research included a content analysis by means of open-ended questions to seek initial impressions of exposures. The sample consisted of 411 undergraduate students across four majors (all from the same institute). The results were meant to determine the attitudes of young people (18-24) toward candidate social networking profiles.

The actual results showed websites and Facebook to be more credible than MySpace. Between websites and Facebook there was no significant difference, but this is only moderately credible; usually colleges and universities belong to one SNS – there are Facebook oriented colleges and MySpace oriented ones (depending on where most classmates are). The open-ended responses were overwhelmingly negative; 50% didn’t like candidates on SNSs, and 30% explicitly noted they wouldn’t base their vote on candidate presence. Non of the formulated hypothesis were entirely established – however there was a trend in the hypothesized direction. Results indicate that SNSs may be credible sources of information, but that the information available may not be fully utilized.

IN CONCLUSION,
I have written – with great enthusiasm I must add – about Web 2.0’s history, positive and negative sides of collective intelligence, open source politics, social networking sites, Juba the Baghdad Sniper, digital era governance in the UK, Campaign 2008 in the US, trickle-up politics, blogging in Greece and self-censorship in China, still there is so much more to add. There are so many presentations I have left out, such as Stephen Schifferes presentation on citizen journalism, in which he remarked how young people get their political news from such programs as The Daily Show and that the visual material watched on the BBC website rarely is about politics (hence, if content is really up to the users then we soon will only be able to watch news on celebrities and nothing about the Middle East). Excellent points were also made by Mike Thelwall about reevaluating notions of blogging and the creation of Habermas’s free discussion Public Sphere, as all user-generated content was banned during the South Korea elections.

The conference truly presented a great deal of theoretical insight and exciting new cases, but unfortunately was too large to attain clear-cut in-depth conclusions. The attention seemed to be on the international character of the conference, therefore many of the parallel sessions were about cases in ‘restricted’ places such as Denmark, Istanbul, or Macedonia. Of course it is great to have a platform for a long tail of political case-studies, yet it makes it difficult to draw up unquestionable statements. Take for instance the topic of Political Blogs (I reviewed one presentation on this topic, there were several more – all concerning local politics), none of the talks really outlined what a political blog is. What makes a blog with political content different from editorials?

What I was hoping for were panels of experts debating a single topic (i.e. on blogging, surveillance, journalism, etc.), instead of having them one after another presenting their research results. I was hoping for lively discussions and active audiences. In fact Michael Turk says it best: “The speaker began by requesting that his presentation not be quoted without his prior approval. This reflects a larger trend that Micah [Sifry] and I have discussed here. This is a conference about web 2.0, that attempts to explore web 2.0 use by political actors, but completely fails to recognize the encroachment of the Internet and Web 2.0 on its own world. Almost none of the participants here are blogging. Before the first session Micah asked if anyone present knew of a tag being used for blogging the conference. Everyone in the room stared at him as if a third arm had suddenly sprung from his forehead. For a web 2.0 conference, the participants were remarkably web 1.0 (perhaps even web 0.5).”

Roman Tol is a Dutch new media fan, reviewer, and critic. Roman obtained a Master degree at the University of Amsterdam (New Media and Digital Culture). His thesis-research concentrated on two relatively new phenomena: Locative Media and Protocol. Since 2006 Roman has actively participated on the Masters of Media Blog. His contributions vary from conference reviews to posts concerning artistic practices on- and offline. In September 2007 he assisted the production of PICNIC Jr. and the Come Out and Play Festival (employed by Waag Society).